> It was estimated that the water would reach us in about 30 minutes. We continued with our breakfast, unaware of the seriousness of what was coming our way. Then, without warning, the water hit us.
Without warning, you say?
I guess they meant without any immediate tangible evidence that water is actually going to hit them, but there definitely was a warning.
Is it common to get false alarms or to wait it out and see when getting informed of a flood? At face value it just seems reckless, but I don't know enough about cave exploring to judge.
> if there was a great flood that destroyed most of human civilization that would also describe why this occurred
Do floods kill significantly more men than women?
How much area would need to be flooded to affect most of human civilization 8-10k years ago? By that point we were spread out throughout the entire planet (except what, Polynesia and New Zealand?)
the way I read it, there were only 800 ft (less than 250 m, or around 15 seconds at a sink rate of 3000 fpm) standing between a "minor incident" and a major disaster.
>it will be more water on a hillside than many of those hillsides can bear
A good example was the Oso mudslide. Nearby Darrington gets 80 inches a year. (Twice as much as Seattle!) March 2014, a storm drops 3 to 5 inches on soil saturated by six months of rain, and a hill lets go. Killed 43 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide
It answers the questions, "Where could the water for a worldwide flood come from? And, where could it go, afterward?". A: The water came from melting glaciers, and it's all still there, drowning the ancestral homelands.
Australian oral traditions record social upheavals when people moving out of the flooded Sahul region (between present Australia and New Guinea) had to negotiate shared use of the high ground that had already been populated for at least 40,000 y. It seems a safe guess that it would be traumatic to have to leave an area your people have lived in for tens of millennia.
> If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood
They probably flooded increasingly regularly before being abandoned and eventually subsumed, no unlike Venice today. Some could have been much quicker though, there are fault lines through the region though, so it's entirely possible a small tsunamis could have knocked out villages that sea level rise made vulnerable.
Yes. Sea level 20kya was 400 feet lower. A million square miles in the region started being inundated then. A common experience of everyone dependent on the sea, 12kya, was seeing their grandparents' villages disappear under water.
> Eventually, that, too, came to an end. On the basis of sediments and computer models, researchers think a tsunami originating off modern-day Norway around 6150 B.C.E. devastated Doggerland with waves at least 10 meters high. Soon the landscape vanished as global sea levels continued to rise.
Ah, another explanation for one of the many "Great Flood" myths.
Once-in-a-century is averaged over many centuries. Sometimes things cluster.
In 2002 parts of Europe were hit by a once-in-a-century flood [1].
In 2013 pretty much the same parts were hit by a flood that in many places were worse than the 2002 flood [2]. For instance, in Passau (on Donau), the waters were the highest since 1501 [3].
> Floods pose a serious threat to those living in the city, with 61 percent of residents having already experienced water damage to their properties. While rainfall poses a threat from above, rising sea levels threaten the city’s inner islands, which could easily be damaged by flooding if canals overflow.
Article: "It already has happened in 1862, and it probably has happened about five times per millennium before that. On human time scales, 100 or 200 years sounds like a long time. But these are fairly regular occurrences."
Wikipedia on 1862 flood: "The event dumped an equivalent of 10 feet (3.0 m) of rainfall in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days."
Thing is, I'm not sure that's true. When do you think that high-water mark was?
reply